%T  International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - RoCHI 2016
%C  Iași
%D  8-9 September 2016
%G  ISSN 2501-9422
%E  Adrian Iftene
%E  Jean Vanderdonckt
%P  119
%W http://rochi2016.utcluj.ro

%T Implementation of a polyglot text-to-speech synthesis in two assistive technologies
%A Paul Fogarassy-Neszly
%A Aurel Patru
%A Dragoș Daniel Iordache
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 2-5
%X The text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is widely used in the area of assistive technologies for visually impaired people as well as for people with dyslexia or related learning disabilities. In the case of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis, both the language identification and voice switching are desirable. This paper presents the implementation of a multilingual text-to-speech in two assistive technologies: the automatic reading machine POET and the portable organizer for blind people Pronto. Both implementations have been tested with visually impaired users. The evaluation results show that the implementation of this software component makes these devices more easy and comfortable to use.
%K Accessibility, assistive technologies, usability, technology acceptance, TTS, visually impaired users.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Fogarassy.pdf

%T Comments on the reliability and validity of UMUX and UMUX-LITE short scales
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 6-10
%X Recent work on usability and user experience shows several concerns on the validity of evaluation instruments. There is a debate on the use of standardized scales versus short scales, such as UMUX and UMUX-LITE or even a single-item measure of usability. Nevertheless, there are relatively few papers reporting the testing of these scales together for reliability and validity. This paper aims at discussing the UMUX and UMUX-LITE scales that have been tested in the context of Facebook use by university students. From a theoretical point of view, both scales are questionable. From an empirical point of view, the testing results confirmed a lack of unidimensionality as well as a poor reliability and convergent validity of these scales.
%K Usability scales, UMUX, UMUX-LITE, factor analysis, validity, Facebook use.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Pribeanu.pdf

%T Automated Evaluation of Menu by Guidelines Review
%A Sara Bouzit
%A Gaëlle Calvary
%A Denis Chêne
%A Jean Vanderdonckt
%P 11-21
%X This paper presents ERGOSIM, a software that automatically evaluate the design of menu bars, pull-down menus, and sub-menus of a graphical user interface by reviewing usability guidelines related to menu design. In this method, a menu design is parsed against the definition of usability guidelines in order to detect potential usability problems manifested by any occurrence where a guidelines is not respected. Four evaluation strategies are enabled depending on the end user’s preferences: an active strategy initiated by the system, a passive strategy initiated by the designer, a mixed strategy collaboratively initiated by both the designer and the system, and a strategy by conceptual units based on the domain. From an initial corpus of 312 usability guidelines compiled from different sources on menu design, a final knowledge base of 58 implemented usability guidelines has been obtained for automatic evaluation. By examining how each usability guideline for menu design is expressed, we discuss to what extent such guidelines could be automated in an automated process by guidelines review.
%K Automatic evaluation; computer-aided design; evaluation strategy; heuristic evaluation; menu bar; pull-down menus; sub-menus; usability guidelines.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Bouzit.pdf

%T Perceived aesthetics of user-modifiable layouts: a comparison between an unspecified design and a GUI
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%A Brahma Dathan
%P 22-25
%X This paper presents the results of an experiment in which students are asked to reposition rectangular shapes in a window in two cases: when they are or they are not told that the window should be considered the configuration of a graphical user interface (GUI). The main aim of the research is to investigate if users have different aesthetical preferences in the two distinct cases. Other goals are to see if, in the case of a GUI, the aesthetical criteria relate to cognitive ergonomics and if there are some preferred shape patterns.
%K Beauty measures; aesthetics; human-computer interfaces design; cognitive ergonomics
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Trausan-Matu.pdf

%T Enactment of User Interface Development Methods in Software Life Cycles
%A Iyad Khaddam
%A Hanaa Barakat
%A Jean Vanderdonckt
%P 26-35
%X This paper presents UIDLC Manager, a software that provides user interface designers and developers with methodological guidance throughout user interface development life cycle. A methodologist firstly creates a dashboard model of the life cycle according to a corresponding meta-model in order to define a development path, decomposed into development tasks which structure the path into actions, and dependencies which serve as methodological milestones. A user interface designer or developer then enacts a previously defined development path by instantiating and interpreting a dashboard model while being provided with methodological guidance to conduct this development path. This guidance consists of steps, sub-steps, cheat sheets, and methodological actions. This approach is validated by applying it on nine classical user interface development life cycles, on two approaches for forward model-driven engineering of user interfaces based on a user interface description language, and on a linguistic approach for user interface software evolution.
%K Dashboard model, dependency, development path, evolution, method enactment, method engineering, methodological guidance, model driven engineering, user interface description language, user development life cycle.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Khaddam.pdf

%T Increasing the Accuracy of Indoor Localization Applications by Using Predefined Markers and the Phones Camera
%A Szabolcs Orban
%A Teodor Ștefănuț
%P 36-41
%X This article shows our approach on determining the global position of an Android device user, who wants to navigate in an interior of a building. The application is based on our previous application, which offers the possibility to navigate through a 3D model using the movement of a mobile phone, determined by its own sensors. Previously the application used the navigations starting position given by the user himself. The method presented in this article adds to the accuracy of the existing application by using predefined points detected with the phone’s camera. These points are placed in the building to determine the initial position or to correct the placement errors of the user. After the location is determined the application switches back to the navigation using the phone’s sensors.
%K Augmented reality, mobile application, indoor localisation, phone sensors
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Orban.pdf

%T Using WSN and Mobile Apps for Home and Office Ambient Monitoring and Control
%A Cătălin Damian
%A Lenuţa Alboaie
%A Adrian Iftene
%P 42-45
%X This paper presents a complex system (hardware and software) that is used to monitor and control some ambient parameters (temperature, humidity, light intensity, etc.). Monitoring parameters are temperature, humidity and light intensity. The system provides remote and automated control of local devices that can be used to assure the security or to increase the comfort indicator of the air.
%K Sensors; air quality; monitoring; wireless communication; mobile applications.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Damian.pdf

%T Sphero - Multiplayer Augmented Game (SMAUG)
%A Marian-Nicolae Pînzariu
%A Adrian Iftene
%P 46-49
%X The current paper exposes the development of a game application that combines augmented reality, modern robotics, mobile features and multiplayer networking in order to create an immersive collaboration system, where people can interconnect to have fun and complete entertaining tasks together. SMAUG is a game based on Sphero 2.0 robotic ball, where multiple players share the same driving control of the robot. Depending on the game session and quest, a player can influence a certain moving direction or the robot's speed. Furthermore, the playground is augmented on the driving surface, so each player is looking to the game scene through his/her mobile’s camera. The main objective here is that players need to collaborate in order to accomplish various tasks: collecting game artifacts, drive on augmented tracks, break down walls/gates, escape mazes and so on. In order to accomplish this objective the game is demanding collaboration: the game artifacts are distributed to different players augmented views, so they will need to communicate often in order to drive Sphero in the right direction. Finally, the most important objective was to open a new perspective on the Sphero-driven application development, creating at the same time the possibility of using mobile devices to conduct team-building activities.
%K Augmented Reality; Robotics; Multiplayer Networking; Mobile Application.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Pinzariu.pdf

%T Reducing Gestural Interaction Physical Stress in Virtual Environments: an Experiment
%A Sobhi Ahmed
%A Laure Leroy
%A Ari Bouaniche
%P 50-57
%X Despite the advantages of gestural interactions, they involve several drawbacks. One major drawback is their negative physical impact. To reduce them, it is important to go through a process of assessing risk factors to determine the interactions’ level of acceptability and comfort so as to make them more ergonomic and less tiring. We propose a method for assessing the risk factors of gestures based on the methods of posture assessment in the workplace and the instructions given by various standards. The goal is to improve interaction in virtual environments and make it less stressful and more effortless. We present our experiment which aims at validating our approach of evaluating gestural interactions.
%K Gestural interaction; gesture assessment; musculoskeletal disorders; gestural stress.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Ahmed.pdf

%T Oculus Rift 3D Interaction and Nicotine Craving: Results from a Pilot Study
%A Ioana Monica Ciolan
%A Sabin C. Buraga
%A Ion Dafinoiu
%P 58-64
%X Virtual reality is a new technology used in the treatment of nicotine addiction that involves immersing smokers in environments with specific stimuli in order to reduce the level of craving. The present study aims to present a new virtual reality technology (in this case, Oculus Rift) used to assess craving of Romanian smokers. Results showed that smokers feel a higher craving after the exposure to virtual reality environments with specific stimuli than neutral stimuli.
%K Smoking Addiction; Nicotine Craving; Virtual Reality; User Testing; Interaction Experiment; Oculus Rift.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Ciolan.pdf

%T Brain Computer Interface using Machine Learning
%A Cristian-Valeriu Soare
%P 65-68
%X This paper presents the design and development of a complete hardware and software solution for a brain computer interface (BCI). It consists of a non-intrusive multiple channel data acquisition device which captures the electrical brain wave signals and passes the data to a computer. The computer then uses signal processing and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in the signals received from the BCI. The goal of the device is to be a highly adaptable BCI, able to be used in a multitude of applications ranging from object recognition to basic control functions. Currently, the system is work in progress.
%K Brain-computer interface; Data acquisition; Machine learning; EEG; Feature extraction
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Soare.pdf

%T Methodology for Identification and Evaluation of Web Application Performance Oriented Usability Issues
%A Mihaela Ciugudean
%A Dorian Gorgan
%P 69-75
%X This paper aims to illustrate a methodology for identifying and assessing a set of performance issues encountered in a particular web application, with impact on the usability level. Throughout this methodology, several visual techniques are determined and investigated by taking advantage of the functionalities offered by available performance monitoring tools such as JMeter and VisualVM. This way, the major performance concerns and their impact on the web application usability are easily determined. Therefore, by identifying the problematic parts of a system, corrective measures could be taken, particularly designed to operate on the root cause of the problem, thus leading to the targeted objective. Moreover, some performance improvement recommendations are further on presented in order to enhance the overall usability and the user experience, the actual goal of the research and development activities conducted. These performance concerns might be designed and implemented after fixing the critical parts causing usability problems and consequently, maximizing the user satisfaction and comfort when exploring the functionalities offered by a particular web application.
%K Interactive software application; usability; performance improvement; JMeter; VisualVM; user experience; visual techniques.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Ciugudean.pdf

%T Testing the technology acceptance model with Romanian university students
%A Alexandru Balog
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 76-80
%X Social networking websites, in general, and Facebook, in particular, gained a lot of popularity among university students. The increasing rate of the Facebook adoption stimulates the researchers to analyze and explain its usage. A well known model able to do this is the technology acceptance model (TAM) that has been tested on a large diversity of computer systems. This paper presents a case study in testing TAM to explain the adoption of Facebook by Romanian university students. The model estimation results show that the perceived ease of use and the perceived enjoyment have a stronger influence on the intention to use Facebook than the perceived usefulness. This study found that the most important determinant is the perceived enjoyment.
%K Social networking sites, technology acceptance, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Balog.pdf

%T Measuring the negative effects of the Facebook dependence on the students’ university work
%A Gabriel Gorghiu
%A Valentina Iuliana Manea
%A Dragoș Daniel Iordache
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 81-85
%X Recent research on the use of social networking websites reveals an intense use of Facebook that may cross the boundaries between use and abuse and may lead to dependence. The objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the Facebook dependence and the negative consequences of the excessive use of Facebook on the students’ university work. An associated objective is to adapt and test two sub-scales measuring the withdrawal syndrome and the negative effects on the university work. The results of two empirical study that used samples from two Romanian universities show a significant positive correlation between the Facebook dependence and its negative effects on the work of students.
%K Social networking websites, Facebook, Facebook use and abuse, negative effects of social networking websites.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Gorghiu.pdf

%T Evaluation of Tesys e-Learning Platform’s Interface
%A Paul Ștefan Popescu
%A Marian Cristian Mihăescu
%A Mihai Mocanu
%A Costel Ionașcu
%P 86-90
%X Online educational environments became more and more popular as a method for implementing distance learning programmes at universities. E-learning platforms serve as means of interaction for online educational environments and so they need to be well optimized for offering a better user experience. In this paper is presented the methodology and results obtained after the evaluation of the Tesys e-learning platform. The survey was taken by a group of students that saw the first time the e-Learning platform and they did several actions. After that they had to complete three surveys, one for every testing purpose targeted in the paper and we analyzed the results. The results offered us an overview on the actual state of the e- learning platform; on one side there are still some improvements to be done and on the other some interfaces and controls were validated via this study.
%K e-Learning platform; HCI; interface evaluation
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Popescu.pdf

%T MOOCBuddy: a chatbot for personalized learning with MOOCs
%A Carmen Holotescu
%P 91-94
%X With the proliferation of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) providers, like Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, UniCampus.ro, NOVAMOOC.uvt.ro or MOOC.ro, it’s a real challenge to find the best learning resource. MOOCBuddy – a MOOC recommender system as a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, based on user’s social media profile and interests, could be a solution. MOOCBuddy is looking like the big trend of 2016, based on the Messenger Platform launched by Facebook in the mid of April 2016.
%K MOOCs; chatbot; Messenger platform; personalized learning; recommender system.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Holotescu.pdf

%T ReaderBench goes Online: A Comprehension-Centered Framework for Educational Purposes
%A Gabriel Gutu
%A Mihai  Dascălu
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%A Philippe Dessus
%P 95-102
%X In this paper we introduce the online version of our ReaderBench framework, which includes multi-lingual comprehension-centered web services designed to address a wide range of individual and collaborative learning scenarios, as follows. First, students can be engaged in reading a course material, then eliciting their understanding of it; the reading strategies component provides an in-depth perspective of comprehension processes. Second, students can write an essay or a summary; the automated essay grading component provides them access to more than 200 textual complexity indices covering lexical, syntax, semantics and discourse structure measurements. Third, students can start discussing in a chat or a forum; the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) component provides in- depth conversation analysis in terms of evaluating each member’s involvement in the CSCL environments. Eventually, the sentiment analysis, as well as the semantic models and topic mining components enable a clearer perspective in terms of learner’s points of view and of underlying interests.
%K Sentiment analysis; Semantic models; Topic mining; Automated essay grading; Reading strategies; Computer Supported framework. Collaborative Learning; ReaderBench
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Gutu.pdf

%T Event detection in Tweets
%A Andrei - Bogdan Baran 
%A Adrian Iftene
%P 103-106
%X Twitter is among the fastest-growing online social networking services, with more than 140 million users producing over 400 million tweets per day. It enables users to post status updates (tweets) about a huge variety of topics to a network of followers using various communication services such as cell phones, e-mails, Web interfaces, or other third-party applications. Monitoring and analyzing this rich and continuous user- generated content can lead to obtaining valuable information about local and global news and events, because virtually, any person witnessing or involved in any event is nowadays able to disseminate realtime information, which can reach the other side of the world as the event unfolds. Having a rich data set, we are going to show how to process the tweets in order to obtain valuable information in real time, based on user preferences and different search criteria.
%K Twitter; Event detection; Hadoop Ecosystem; Map- Reduce.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Baran.pdf

%T Rhythm analysis of texts using Natural Language Processing
%A Irina-Diana Niculescu
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%P 107-112
%X The paper is introducing a research aiming to analyze rhythm in various genres of texts. After a review of the literature on rhythm formalization in texts, a Natural Language Processing application was developed for analyzing the rhythmicity in three cases: poem, prose, and political speech. The application implemented three formal approaches for rhythm analysis, proposed for the Romanian and French languages. Factors such as: rhythmic unit, rhythmic structure, and rhythmic index were considered. Comparisons are made between different genres, approaches, and languages.
%K Rhythm; natural language processing; rhythmic unit; rhythmic structure; rhythmic index
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Niculescu.pdf

%T Terrain Synthesis from Crude Heightmaps
%A Alexandre Philippe Mangra
%A Adrian Sabou
%A Dorian Gorgan
%P 113-118
%X This paper presents an approach to terrain synthesis from minimal-detail user-provided heightmaps. There is no assumption regarding the level of detail provided, in order to allow users without access to powerful heightmap tools and/or resources to generate useable terrain based on a self-provided crude feature plan. We present the issues stemming from a lack of detail in user input, notably sharp altitude increases and oversimplified feature edges, and proceed to elaborate on using the terrain synthesis algorithm to solve the issues and create a level of detail that more closely resembles realistic terrain models. The algorithm pipeline is presented and parametrized to show how the user can influence the resulting model.
%K Terrain synthesis; Heightmap; Worley noise; Perlin noise; Filters.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/4/RoCHI2016-Mangra.pdf